Mysterious UFO sightings may go hand in hand with a puzzling natural phenomenon known as sprites  flashes high in the atmosphere triggered by thunderstorms. The dancing lights have appeared above most thunderstorms throughout history, but researchers did not start studying them until one accidentally recorded a sighting on camera in 1989. "Lightning from the thunderstorm excites the electric field above, producing a flash of light called a sprite," said Colin Price, a geophysicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. "We now understand that only a specific type of lightning is the trigger that initiates sprites aloft."

I’ve seen sprites in thunderstorms that roll in from North Dakota to Minnesota at night, and they have been spectacular. I’ve also seen the orbs that sometimes move around as if consciously directed to go here and there, which suddenly fly away at great speed. The two are completely different. It says something about science that sprites were not studied much before 1989. They were certainly a prominent phenomena back in 1965. We thought they were reflections of the lightning off extremely high clouds which formed over intense thunderstorms at night. As to UFOs, at least 1% of the video sightings these days are inexplicable otherwise. Unfortunately, hoaxes predominate there.

8
posted on 02/24/2009 6:34:46 PM PST
by Sundog
(Atlas Shrugged needs to be required reading . . . Which character are you?)

It's every thing from weather ballons to swamp gas to flares to Chinese lanterns ect. Why do they not just say we don't know or we know and we are not going to tell you. When the govm’t went to closed system under the very wide umbrella of national security to keep information from the public, who contrary to the govm’t belief can handle the truth and want the truth.

11
posted on 02/24/2009 6:47:41 PM PST
by guitarplayer1953
(Psalm 83:1-8 is on the horizon.)

the idea that a high altitude lightning strike hit Columbia and the picture that was taken from CA that morning.

Top investigators of the Columbia space shuttle disaster are analyzing a startling photograph -- snapped by an amateur astronomer from a San Francisco hillside -- that appears to show a purplish electrical bolt striking the craft as it streaked across the California sky. Late Tuesday, NASA dispatched former shuttle astronaut Tammy Jernigan, now a manager at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, to the San Francisco home of the astronomer to examine his digital images and to take the camera itself to Mountain View, where it was to be transported by a NASA T-38 jet to Houston this morning. A Chronicle reporter was present when the astronaut arrived. First seeing the image on a large computer screen, she had one word: "Wow." Jernigan, who is no longer working for NASA, quizzed the photographer on the aperture of the camera, the direction he faced and the estimated exposure time -- about four to six seconds on the automatic Nikon 880 camera. It was mounted on a tripod, and the shutter was triggered manually. In the critical shot, a glowing purple rope of light corkscrews down toward the plasma trail, appears to pass behind it, then cuts sharply toward it from below. As it merges with the plasma trail, the streak itself brightens for a distance, then fades. "It certainly appears very anomalous," said Jernigan. "We sure will be very interested in taking a very hard look at this."

The chosen experiment was called "The Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment, or MEIDEX. Its purpose was to examine the desert dust phenomena as a crucial factor in the cause for global warming. In addition, a backup experiment was determined and its purpose was to collect data regarding unknown lightning phenomena in heights between 80 and 100 kilometers. The Late Colonel Ilan Ramon and Lieutenant Colonel YitzhakMaio began training towards the shuttle flight in the HustonSpaceCenter on 1998. The experiment chosen was intended to aid the research of global change, a subject now at the front of international atmospheric research. The experiment planned by a team of researchers from the geophysics and planetary science department in the Tel-AvivUniversity, was preformed on 2003, on the space shuttle "Colombia", flight STS-107, for a period of 16 days. Sadly, the trip's end was disastrous, and the "Colombia" and its seven crewmembers were destroyed when the shuttle entered the atmosphere. During the experiment, the shuttle circled earth in an height of 278 Km, every hour and a half, passing over the Mediterranean twice or three times a day in daylight. The Late Ilan Ramon was elected to perform the experiment. When the shuttle passed over our area, he took several photos of aerosols in various wave-lengths (tiny particles hovering in the atmosphere, and usually come from the desert  dust storms of sorts), by using a custom made camera, designed by the Israeli research team. Aerosols come mainly from the Sahara and hover towards the Mediterranean and AtlanticOceans, and greatly influence global warming. This is why NASA invests such efforts to measure their concentration via its satellite. The Israeli experiments also included the collection of aerosol samples from within the photographed clouds, using an Israeli aircraft. The experiment was supposed to enable NASA to calibrate its measurements and to contribute to the improvement of Sun Radiation Atmospheric Penetration modules and to the forecast of global climate changes. In addition, the Israeli astronaut also monitored a new phenomenon in the upper atmosphere, recently discovered during lightning storms, called "Sprites" in the scientific jargon. The shuttle flight also included an experiment which involved junior high school students from the Ort school in KiryatMotzkin. The intention of this experiment is to prove that certain physical phenomena we are familiar with, act differently in zero-g condition than on earth.

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